PRAYER FOR DEW Pesaḥ, the “festival of spring,” marks the end of the rainy season. Accordingly, on the first day at Musaf, we stop saying, “He makes the wind blow and the rain fall” in the second paragraph of the Amida. The Sephardi and Israeli custom is to say instead, “who causes the dew to fall”; we do not have this custom. Nonetheless, to mark the transition, we recite a special liturgical poem (piyyut). Its author is the greatest of Jewry’s liturgical poets, Elazar Kalir. Despite his genius and the sheer number of his compositions (many previously unknown works of his were discovered in the Cairo Geniza), we remain uncertain as to when and where he lived. Many believe him to have lived in the Mishnaic period; others that he lived in the sixth century. His compositions are full of allusions to rabbinic traditions; he coined many new words, and his style – intricate, erudite, full of wordplay and subtle acrostics – influenced many later liturgical poets.

בְּדַעְתּוֹ With His consent: The preamble to the prayer involves an untranslatable play on the similar-sounding words ḥidot (“hidden things”), lehaḥadot (“have joy”), and laḥadot (“be as new”: an Aramaic form of the Hebrew ḥadash). The fourth line is a complex allusion to a wedding. It uses two words that appear together in the last of the seven marriage blessings (ditza and ḥedva). The word “shade” (meaning both cloud and divine protection) may also be an allusion to the bridal canopy. Thus Kalir, through complex verbal resonances, strikes a mood of joy as if spring were the wedding of heaven and earth.

תְּהוֹמוֹת The depths of the earth: A meditation on the fact that dew (and rain) are mentioned in the second paragraph of the Amida, known as Gevurot, “Divine might,” whose dominant theme is the resurrection of the dead. Just as at the end of time God will revive the dead (“those buried in the clefts of the rocks”), so does dew now revive the earth and make it green again. טַל זִכְרוֹ גְּבוּרוֹת מוֹסִיפִים The mention of dew adds to His might: an ambiguous phrase which also means, “Dew is mentioned in [the second paragraph of the Amida known as] ‘His might.’”

טַל תֵּן לִרְצוֹת אַרְצָךְ Dew – Grant it to favor Your land: The six verses of the poem begin and end with the word “Dew,” and the whole is constructed as a reverse alphabetical acrostic, the last two letters (bet and aleph) each being allocated two lines. (Note that in such piyutim, the letters sin and samekh are interchangeable.) The poem deftly intertwines the themes of nature (spring, renewal) and history (asking God to bring His people back from the winter of exile to a spring of national renewal). כַּנָּה To the stock: the root or stem of a vine, a metaphor for Israel (see Psalm 80:16 and commentaries thereto). By comparing Israel to a plant, the poet can extend the metaphor of dew to the fortunes of the nation. כְּעֶרְכְּךָ הַעֲמֵד שְׁמֵֽנוּ Let our name endure as Yours: just as God is eternal, so may be the people who carry His name (“Then all the peoples on earth will see that you are called by the name of the LORD,” Deut. 28:10). בְּמַשְׁמַנֵּֽינוּ In our fertile lands: literally, “In our fat places may there be no leanness.”

לִבְרָכָה וְלֹא לִקְלָלָה For blessing, and not for curse: In this rousing three-line climax (paralleled in the Prayer for Rain), Leader and congregation join in fervent prayer that the forces of nature, under the care of the Maker of nature, should bring blessing to the land and its people.